This is the blog of Brian Long, Windows, Mac & mobile trainer, trouble-shooter and consultant.

Friday, 9 September 2016

Android callbacks wrapped by FireMonkey

A couple of years ago (exactly!) I posted on this blog about an article I’d written on accessing NFC tags from Delphi Android applications. At the time this was quite an involved exercise, requiring custom Java code to be compiled and linked in to the application in order to respond to the pertinent Android callback, Activity.onNewIntent. Indeed, Delphi versions XE5, XE6 and XE7 all have slightly differing capabilities, with each new release making certain Android operations rather easier.

While catching up on what’s new in recent releases of Delphi I realised a change had been snuck into Delphi 10 Seattle that makes the whole NFC exercise much more straightforward now in Delphi. What this change means is:

No more custom Java code required!

No more linking in a custom Java library file

No more activity custom subclassing!

No more debugging obstacles!

This change seems to have gone in completely under the radar*, escaping the attention of the documentation department, so I thought it best that I brought it out into the open.

It turns out that the key activity callback that NFC foreground dispatch relies upon (Activity.onNewIntent) is now hookable from Delphi code (with the right know-how) and so all the Java shenanigans can be put behind us (at least in the context of NFC access). This callback is used in Android in all sorts of other scenarios as well, so if you find a requirement for responding to onNewIntent then Delphi 10 Seattle (and later) makes this something of a doddle.

If you are playing with NFC cards in your apps you can simplify the setup very nicely in the most recent versions of Delphi.

Just to round this topic (given the blog subject) off I’ll also mention that another activity callback, onActivityResult, is also covered by FireMonkey and has been since Delphi XE6. This is also wrapped up in the same messaging system, though this time with the TMessageResultNotification message.

No I'm not sure. You can submit a bug report pointing out it is not up to date. And of course you can download r13, and point the IDE at the various updated tools, which might help you a tad. Though from the NDK, we're looking primarily at the linker (and the debugger sentinel), along with the library. I'm not sure the other bits are too important in terms of being right up to date. It would be a useful exercise to try the latest though.

Hi.Can you please help me with problem (it's related to this topic ) - How to pass boolean (or integer) with PutExtra to intent and read it from Delphi? Here is the details http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42368123/how-to-pass-boolean-or-integer-to-intent-and-read-it-to-detect-that-my-activi